Populêr

Inspired by the historic firing of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, the ANC Youth League says it intends building a similar device to explore, at a subatomic level, the bias of the media and the judiciary against Jacob Zuma.

According to a spokesman, this would be done by colliding newspaper editors and judges at close to the speed of light “to see what happens”. The ambitious project was announced this morning by ANCYL science and technology spokesman Einstein Shabangu, who is currently completing a correspondence course in wheel-alignment at the Tony Yengeni Technical University of the North West. According to Shabangu, the proposed collider would work according to the same principles as the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, which accelerates particles to close to the speed of light in a vast underground tunnel.

“The science is beautifully simple,” he said. “We take two counterrevolutionary particles such as a racist judge and a megalomaniac newspaper editor, we strap them to gurneys, and then accelerate the gurneys to around 600 kilometers per hour, which is close to the speed of light.” He said a “vast array of scientific instruments, mostly Dictaphones and camera-phones”, would monitor the particles for any useful information, such as screamed confessions of racism or evidence of witchcraft.

According to Shabangu, a large number of factors would determine when the climactic collision needed to take place, including the number of spectators, the bias or racism of the particles being collided, and the quality of the free finger snacks being served in the VIP lounge next door. However, he said, the signal would come directly from Luthuli House. “We imagine something dignified and stately, like Comrade Zuma dropping a silk handkerchief or slowly turning his thumbs down.”

He denied that the collider would become a white elephant once all the country’s judges and editors had been hosed off the walls of the machine. “Science is a never-ending struggle,” he said. “If we finish with counterrevolutionary particles we might start a new experiment, perhaps with dissident particles within the party, or ethnic particles.

“That’s the wonderful thing about physics. “It’s just like the socialist revolution. It goes on forever, with an unlimited budget, and you never have to justify whether you’re making any progress or not.”